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ITEC 4300: Quality Assurance: Case Studies in Magazines and Journals

Why Can't I Just Google?

WHY CAN'T I JUST GOOGLE?

Using search engines such as Google plays an increasingly valuable role in the research process, and can alert you to material you would not otherwise come across. When you use freely-available websites, though, you have to be responsible for judging the authoritativeness and quality of what you are seeing, and you will (for the most part) only see what can be offered for free. Libraries have shared buying power and can make available full-text of articles that come through reputable publications that have some kind of editorial review process in place.

 

Google Scholar

If you do want to Google for your case study try this:

Google Scholar Search

Article Databases

Databases covering journals in quality assurance include:

Search Tips

SEARCH TIPS

Boolean Operators -- use the Boolean Operator “AND” to narrow your search:

Example: quality assurance AND hospitals

Instead of looking through all of the articles on quality assurance, you can limit your results to only those articles which deal with quality assurance as it relates to hospitals.

 

Truncation (wild cards)

This varies a bit from database to database. Most often an asterisk * is used but occasionally a question mark (?) is used. Consult the onscreen searching tips for the specific database you are using.

Ex . Case stud* allows you to retrieve “case study” as well as “case studies”

Find a specific journal

Find Full-Text Articles --When you have a citation to a specific journal and you need to get the full text of an article from it
Find E-journal Titles-- When you want to just browse an online journal